


Every Angle of Unfair Advantage

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Blood, Character Study, Cunnilingus, Multi, Other, Power Dynamics, Threesome - F/F/M, Torture, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, anna ripley fucking hates rich people, bryan fuller 'hannibal' kind of graphic, but y'all know your limits better than i do, playing fast n loose with pre-stream canon here lads, than it is a 'saw' kind of vibe, there is a torture scene; it's more...clinically graphic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 05:38:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18309281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: When, on the fourth day, it becomes apparent that the boy isn’t going to break, Anna Ripley washes the blood from her knives, and goes to the Lady Briarwood, and says:“You should let me have the girl.”And the Lady Briarwood says:“No.”Anna Ripley and the Briarwoods, from the early days to the ugly breakup.





	Every Angle of Unfair Advantage

**Author's Note:**

> You can skip everything between "On the twenty-third day, Anna flays open his arm" and "Percival screams" if you'd prefer to avoid reading about the De Rolo line of anatomical teaching models aka 'the part where Percy gets tortured'

> _I'm gonna bribe the officials_  
>  I'm gonna kill all the judges  
> It's gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage  
> \- **Up the Wolves** , The Mountain Goats

When, on the fourth day, it becomes apparent that the boy isn’t going to break, Anna Ripley washes the blood from her knives, and goes to the Lady Briarwood, and says:

“You should let me have the girl.”

And the Lady Briarwood says:

“No.”

Her face is cold and glittering and lovely, because of  _ course _ it is, like clean ribs and distant stars, with the same stern, beautiful moue of disappointment that every rich woman Anna Ripley has ever met seems to know how to make from birth. Anna Ripley does not know how to make this face. Anna Ripley, whose thin, lantern-jawed face has only ever been called “handsome” on her good days, swipes at smear of blood on her temple and curls her lip into her most unimpressed sneer instead. There is a twisting clench in the pit of her stomach that Anna tells herself is  _ not _ jealousy.

“We took you on for a purpose, Dr. Ripley.” The Lady Delilah Briarwood, late of Fenmoor, Baroness of Camoys, continues, trading a sidelong glance with the long, pale shadow of her husband beside her, “But if you find yourself... _ insufficient _ to the task…”

“I work on  _ people _ ,” Ripley hisses, “What you gave me was a piece of  _ meat _ . I can keep butchering him for the next six years if you like, but there isn’t anything  _ there _ . Give me the girl, give  _ him _ something to care about, or--”

Ripley’s chest heaves, has been for the past five minutes, and it’s almost exactly like pacing in front of a dead-eyed committee of her so-called betters, trying to wring funding from idiots and blood from a stone in a university an ocean away. Anna Ripley works her jaw back and forth while her hands spasm in and out of clenched talons at her sides. She swallows. “Or you can finish killing him, and drag whatever answers you’re looking for out of his corpse. I understand you have some experience in that arena.”

She does not call Delilah “Lady Briarwood.”

Lady Briarwood does not call her “insolent, gutter-born bitch”, but only just.

“If he needs a reason to keep living long enough to talk, then I suggest you find one for him, Doctor. My husband and I have every confidence in your abilities. It would be a shame if we came to regret that.”

Lady Delilah Briarwood thumbs idly at her wedding ring.

Her husband smiles.

His teeth are very white.

[x]

On the twenty-third day, Anna flays open his arm.

It’s not hurting him anymore, not  _ really _ , but it’s...peaceful, just to lose herself in the work. Dissecting out the major blood vessels in his forearm takes the better part of an hour, carefully flensing flesh from bone, peeling tendons apart like orange sections. Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III watches her with glassy blue eyes, miles away. She took one of them, once, weeks ago, at the very beginning, but Lady Delilah Briarwood snarled something about blasphemy against a God Anna neither knows nor cares about, and cast something else that left her gagging and trembling for the next three days. So now she leaves his eyes alone.

At intervals, he whimpers, more because he can’t  _ stop _ the small, soft animal of his body from whimpering than anything else.

She taps the back of his gorey knuckles with the end of a scalpel. 

“Quiet, please.” 

Yesterday, she shattered most of his ribs, so when he speaks, it comes out a thready, death-rattle wheeze. But he  _ can _ speak, which is the important thing. Torture 101. He can talk, even if all he says is:

“You call  _ this _ torture?”

His head lolls to one side, and Anna rights it, fingertips firm against his jaw. 

“Hardly. You should try writing a syllabus,” she drawls.

_ The extensor digitorum communis attaches in its upper part to the lateral epicondyle of the humerus, and diverges in its lower part into four, which four are inserted into the medial and distal phalanges of the hand in the following manner…. _

Anna cuts the attachments, one by one, left to right, dorsal surface down to palmar until his whole arm, elbow to fingertips, is split open, and it’s the same dull red-brown as everybody else’s insides, a wormy knitwork laid out on the table. It’s...fair, it’s  _ equality,  _ maybe the only thing that’s  _ really  _ fair, that everybody,  _ really _ , where it  _ counts _ , is just meat. Even a de Rolo. Even a Briarwood. Even--

“You’re too late,” Percival rasps dully, “I keep telling you. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got nothing left to lose.” 

Anna snorts, throwing a lever. The examination table drops two feet, and Anna Ripley draws up a stool. It’s been hours now. Her back isn’t what it used to be.  From the new angle, they are at eye level with each other. In a manner of speaking; his eyes are fixed upwards, teary and out of focus. 

She curls her lip. "You people."

And what she means is:

The Lord and Lady Briarwood, and his Majesty  Bertrand Dwendel , long may he reign, and every soft-handed, inbred, filthy fucking rich duke's third-cousin's lesser son who she used to sell exam answers to, because they figured that mummy and daddy's money and the rural bumfuck barony that great-grandpapa stole way back when, that those would always be enough to save them, and gods fucking damn them, they were right. In the short term, at least.

She means the look they give you.

She means every single  _ fucking _ de Rolo, individually, and as a unit.

"The problem with you people is that you all suffer the same delusions of grandeur, and none of you have even the slightest sense of perspective."

But you have to be patient with them, don’t you, you have to be  _ patient _ with students, because they really  _ are _ just too young to know any better, especially the ones who come from money, they never take things seriously enough, they just don’t know how, because they've never had to, have they? They just tinker, not  _ invested _ in anything, because they’ve never needed to be, and the  _ extensor digitorum is innervated by the posterior interosseous nerve, which itself, in its primary character, branches in a deep, which is to say non-superficial aspect, forth from the radial nerve. _ .. With same swift  _ flick _ she used to mark papers with, Anna jabs a needle into it, and twists. 

And that was always the hardest part, really, trying to figure out how to  _ reach _ people. This way is  _ much _ easier. Twenty-three days, and really, they aren’t such different people. He reminds her, more than little, of herself, twenty years back.

So Anna twists, calmly, until she sees his glassy blue eyes flicker, determined, the way he’s learning to be these days, to  _ prove  _ something by watching her work. She presses her hand, red to the wrist, over his. “There is  _ always _ something to lose. For example,” and Anna Ripley leans in, until she can see the fine hairs at the edge of his neck stir with her breath, “if you die here, who do you think is ever going to punish us for what we did?”

She squeezes his hand.

Percival screams.

[x]

On the ninety-fifth day, they take her to bed.

It’s the strangest feeling. Sylas Briarwood’s pale flank is smooth and cool, and it gives  _ almost _ like flesh, but not  _ quite _ . He doesn’t bleed.

Anna Ripley sits astride his face, teeth bared, finished with an  _ A,  _ halfway through carving an  _ R  _ into the white candle-flesh of his hip while he works her with his mouth, for which impertinence his wife wrenches Anna back by the hair and backhands her so hard across the face that she tastes blood, toppling from her seat to sprawl, graceless and snarling, on the mattress.

Anna licks the blood from the backs of her teeth. So does Sylas. So does Delilah.

The Lady Briarwood wraps her hand (soft, nails lacquered like Anna’s never are, pitted with strange scars across the anterior surface of the palm and wrist) around Anna’s neck, pressing up into in the soft underside of her jaw. 

“He’s not  _ yours _ ,” she says softly.

Anna sneers.

They’re both so--

Delilah Briarwood is beautiful in every way she  _ hates _ , and so is  _ he _ , and it’s hard to breathe, and Anna is giddy with spite and lack of oxygen as her hand finds the Lord Briarwood’s chest and claws down. Delilah Briarwood is beautiful is every way she  _ hates _ , but Delilah is soft in a handful of critical places, Delilah has never had to heft a shovel or climb a fence out of a graveyard or haul a dead man up and out of a six foot hole, and so Delilah Briarwood does not have the strength to hold her for long. 

So Anna twists free, and claws down Sylas’s chest, and the welts she leaves behind are a waxy corpse-lavender, and he lets her, and Anna purrs “I don’t hear him complaining.”

He doesn’t.

Sylas, lounging indolently pushed up one elbow, draws her up close to his side and chuckles darkly. 

“I cast myself on your tender mercies, Doctor.”  He pushes his hand into her hair, scratching gently at her scalp, and it’s very nearly a fond gesture, instead of just insulting. Anna allows it, even allows her eyes to slip closed for just a split second before his fist seizes painfully in her hair, and shoves her froward, level with Delilah’s hip.

Anna scrabbles uselessly at his wrist.

“But I think you need to apologize to my wife.”

She laughs, breathlessly, unhinged, dark hair falling wildly around her face where it isn’t knotted in Sylas’s fist, and Anna does not say “I apologize”, and at the same time that she doesn’t say this, Delilah says “Sylas,” and behind her, he nods.

Anna dives in.

It’s--gods, it’s  _ good _ , Delilah Briarwood is slick and blood-hot and they’re going to kill her, probably, if not now then one day, unless she can get to them first, but they’re all being  _ honest _ about it, and what else can you ask for, really? There are two sets of hands in her hair, pulling on the wrong side of pain while she fucks her tongue into Delilah in a short, sharp rhythm. It is, quite possibly, the best she’s felt in  _ years _ . Her stomach trembles from the strain of her position, an awkward diagonal with her weight balanced between her knees and her chemical-scarred hands digging into the meat of the Lady Briarwood’s perfect, heart-shaped ass.

Her flesh is soft and yielding. Anna wants to rip her apart.

There is a soft sound above her, Delilah panting into Sylas’s mouth, which she can barely hear over her own pulse throbbing in her ears. Over  _ Delilah’s _ pulse, which Anna can feel pounding in her cunt, fluttering against her tongue.

(Sylas doesn’t have one. Which raises some... _ interesting _ questions about his ability to— Anna snickers, hiding her smirk in Delilah’s thigh, and thinks--

Delilah yanks savagely at her hair, and pulls her back up.)

The thing is:

She wouldn’t be here, in this bed, with these people, if they thought she was any of kind of threat. What they think, which is the same thing that people like them  _ always _ think when they see Anna is: here is a tool. It can be used to perform tasks. Good teeth. Thick hair. Handsome, like a thing you can buy and display. 

_ But _ , and that’s the worst part, but the  _ other _ thing is:

Not being a threat is the best way to get close enough to  _ become _ a threat. You count the soft spots. You swallow your pride. And you swallow it and swallow it and swallow it until the iron bile of it forms a knife in your throat. People realize you’re a threat too soon, and you end up fleeing the fucking country.

Delilah Briarwood, at least, tastes better than swallowed pride. Delilah Briarwood  _ whimpering _ , a thin, needy, animal sound high in her throat, is the best thing Anna has ever heard, and she nearly comes herself, right there, wondering if that’s the sound Delilah would make if she just hauled off and shot her. If Delilah’s face would be anything like it is now, shuddering like a broken window, with her lips curled back and her eyes squeezed desperately shut. Anna sucks at her clit with redoubled fervor.

Sylas hauls her back by the hips, pushing her spine down into a supplicant’s prostrate arch; the grip feels like nothing, just a pressure, and coldness so sharp it burns. Anna howls in outrage, and sinks her teeth into the petal-thin join of his wife’s hip and leg.

Her back isn’t what it used to be.

So:

Anna sucks Delilah's clit. Anna sucks an ugly bruise into Delilah’s smooth, soft skin in every place she can think it might  _ really _ hurt, and meanwhile, Sylas sinks his teeth into Anna’s shoulder.

In the aftermath, Anna does not ask to stay, and the Lord and Lady Briarwood do not offer.

Her room in Whitestone is cold.

[x]

On the eight hundred and forty second day, they throw her in jail.


End file.
